I still think people are misplacing "soul" as merely having voice acting or some kind of character or theme in a game.
Pure sim-racers with bare-bones UI and zero sound direction have "no soul" (even then it could probably be argued). DC has a tightly-packaged theme and style to it that screams to me "get in, shut up and drive" without having to use a corny voiceover or some flimsy premise to motivate me.
DC's motivation is the racing. If a game does other things to motivate you on top of that, that's fine. But if people think a driving game lacks something because it doesn't have some kind of backstory or thin premise, then they weren't looking for a pure driving experience in the first place... perhaps they were looking for some other kind of game with driving as one of a number of features.